As a child I never had a Christmas village or a train that ran around the bottom of the tree. I think this was because no one in my family had a tradition of doing this. Later on my mom and I started a tradition of painting one piece to a ceramic village every year. I personally want to modernize the village, go high tech and have all the little carolers holding iphones and Acer Aspire laptops. I never really thought about what these villages were, it was just something that we started doing because it's what you do at Christmas time.
According to wikipedia a Christmas village can also be called a putz and they originate from the Pennsylvania Dutch. The villages formed from nativity scenes becoming more and more detailed. They may even have been decorated with real sawdust or moss. So basically it started out with just a manger scene but got expanded further and further out into an entire village. The village is basically the suburbs of the manger.
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